UnderRail

Hi guys, we are releasing a new major update of the base game on the experimental branch. If everything goes as planned, we'll be releasing it to the main branch as well soon.

To play experimental branch on Steam, you right click the game in your library and go to "Betas" tab. To do so on GOG, you select the game and choose More->Settings. Make sure you don't override all your live version saves just in case something goes horribly wrong.

We have new creatures, items and feats.

Here are the full patch notes:

Interface

You can now configure transparency of transitions (also increased the default transparency)

Objects that transition you between areas (transition that requires loading) when you use them should not display the transitioning cursor

Added transparency to NPC health/psi/shield/cast bars on the map

Items

Added new high-energy battery type

Increased the weight of the fishing rod

Removed cooldown for placing fishing rods

Increased the damage and critical damage bonus of Quake

Significantly increased the value of a lot of unique items (mostly weapons)

Nerfed Power Fist

Increased the max stack size of scraps to 999

Trapper's Belt will now increase Traps skill by 15% (up from 10%); it will no longer reduce trap arming cooldown

Added two new belts that augment chemical pistol attacks

Regenerative Mixture will now be affected by game difficulty

Special bolts affected by Elemental Bolts feat will now display the modified damage in the tooltip

Fixed incorrectly set impact speed of unique assault rifles (raised from medium to high, as should be the value for all assault rifles) and corrected the lack of move and shoot precision penalty for those guns

Fixed Jawbone lacking move and shoot precision penalty (now set to 15%) as well as close quarters precision penalty (now 10%)

Fixed low durability of armor worn by Tchortist rassophores and recombinants; only applies to npc armor (armor in the player's possession will remain unchanged)

Creatures

Increased Coil Spider psi points and psi regeneration

Coil Spiders now have darkvision

Added Greater Coil Spiders

Added a new machinegun turret to replace the regular auto-turret in certain places and on certain difficulties

Increased dodge and evasion of burrower spawns, but also increased their susceptibility to AoE attacks

Dogs will now attempt to bump you out of stealth when the detection gets into ALERTED state, just like human NPCs (on normal difficulty or higher)

Added a stronger version of psi beetle

Increased crawler attack damage a bit; they also regenerate health now (even in combat) and have dark vision

Added a stronger version of crawler

Added stronger version of mutants Hunchback mutants

Mechanics

Added the global map

Added DOMINATING difficulty, mechanically it inherits the modifications of hard difficulty and also increased NPC health by 50% and skill levels by 30%.

Changed the way hit change display handles oscillating lighting or otherwise dynamic lighting. This also should fix some anomalies like the hit chances changing when saving/loading or transitioning.

Removed cooldown for arming traps

Removed cooldowns from lockpicking and hacking

Reduced the time it takes for the game to yield the control back to the combatant after he kills the target; it doesn't wait for scrolling text and sounds to end now

Hostilities will now instantly be triggered when you've been detected lockpicking (instead of at the end of the action)

Increased the damage of chemical pistols by 50% (will be applied retroactively on exisiting items)

Ground fire will now remove cryogas

Starting pickpocketing (opening the pickpocketing window) will now require a certain amount of pickpocketing skill depending on the target's detection so not every character can inspect any NPC's inventory (without killing them!)

Targets will no longer be able to block (in regular way) if stunned, incapacitated or frozen

You can now unload chemical pistols

As long as you haven't been fully detected by a NPC, that NPC's detection will be reduced back to zero when you get back into an area where you've been sneaking

Uncanny Dodge will no longer work while you're stunned or incapacitated in some way

Dirty Kick will now be subject to Uncanny Dodge and other special defense mechanisms

You can now root turrets (which makes them susceptible to acidic entanglement)

On normal difficulty and above, transitioning between areas (red transitions) will now cost action points

Improved NPC pathfinding slightly

Primary non-mechanical damage (not caused by on-hit effect) on melee weapons will now scale with weapon skill (like the bio damage on The Claw), but will no longer scale with strength

On hard difficulty EMP will drain energy (and subsequently deal damage to the holder) from all items in the inventory (not just equipped ones)

Reduced the ranged weapon precision reduction from low light slightly

Antidote will now randomly choose the order of poison removal, instead of going in the order they were applied

Tweaks

Turn-based mode will no longer automatically end at the end of the turn if there are incapacitated enemies near

Reduced the alpha on energy shields

Removed the movement animation reseting when rapidly clicking (there's still a very slight stutter if you click very fast, though)

You cannot change armor suit while in stealth or while stealth is on cooldown on hard difficulty or above

High-Technicalities increases damage with energy pistols by 7% for each point of intelligence above 5

Quests/Maps

Because of the global map, some areas had to be added and some had to be reorganized (especially around the starting cave areas) in order to achieve geographical consistency

Added a number of possible random events around the world

Reworked a lot of encounters to scale with game difficulty (from easy to dominating). Normal was mostly kept as it is, but some encounters (typically mid-late and late game ones) were made more difficult on that level.

Reworked the Free Drone's final mission debriefing dialog with Trenton in order to better handle a certain optional outcome

DC mindreading will now take into account the number of killed Faceless, which will have negative effects of varying degrees depending on that number; however, kills during certain story-related events where combat is unavoidable will not be counted

Expanded the Hanging Rat bar and added a base ability check

Bugs

Corrosive acid bolt crits will now multiply the acid damage done just like the regular acid ones

Focus Stim will now properly display duration in the item description

Fixed the Crippling Strike tooltip

Fossilized Egg Oddity max studies changed to 3 as it should have been from the start

Spore Turrets marked as ribles, kneeless and immune to critical hits

Fixed the bug that caused NPCs to not properly react to being alerted (orange eye) to player's presence

Fixed spelling errors in special ammo hit effect descriptions

Fixed the bug that caused Eviscerate to do less damage than stated

Fixed the rounding error with Critical Power feat

Fixed a sneaky bug regarding status effect stacking

Black Dragon poison icon fixed

Fixed the bug that would sometimes cause player to become undead during cutscenes in which he unpredictably dies (this will apply retroactively, RIP)

Fixed the 8.6mm Incendiary Rounds (they weren't igniting)

Jookhela should now be immune to stun and incapacitation like the rest of senior raties (will not update for those who already encountered him)

Removed Gauntlet advertisement from DC

Crawlers and other NPCs should no longer unwittingly bump their own kind/faction out of stealth

Suppressive fire will now only be applied to enemies, as intended

There was a mess up regarding player's increased chance to get critically hit. Contrary to what the game has been saying, there is no universal to-get-crit (TGC) modifier, instead it only applied for weapon and unarmed attacks, which made things like Psychostatic Electricity rather useless. I've now added psi TGC modifier, so recklessness and psychostatic electricity will now apply to psi abilities as well. Everything else will only work for unarmed and weapon attacks. Tooltips have been updated to reflect this.

You will no longer hear the sound of NPCs stealthing when you enter an area for the first time, unless you can see them already

Swapping between two energy weapons while recharging the current weapon will now properly cancel the action

Fixed the bug with plasma sentry when leaving the area while it's deployed in cannon mode

Fixed an issue with player's house containers (lockers, shelves, etc.) wherein the items from upgraded or changed containers wouldn't transfer to an always-present shelf in the northeastern corner of the ground floor

Fixed certain quest notes not being set as completed/failed properly

Fixed a number of skill checks that used base instead of effective required value or had no value set at all

Fixed Sneaky not registering the death of one important npc

Expanded or reworked certain parts of npc dialogs (some more, some less) and also added a few new skills checks to some

Replaced a few windows in fo_prison with solid walls so that the cameras inside the cell block can't see inside the security room. This was done to prevent the cameras from dispatching all the guards into the room even if the player had been granted access to it

Fixed a minor issue with a certain Hathor Mine-related cutscenes

Various minor map and dialog fixes

Have fun with the new stuff and please stay patient as we continue to work on the Expedition DLC.

Report any bugs you find on the forums and make sure you specify which version you're playing.

While our development is mostly focused on the expansion there are a couple of issues that we wanted to address before its release as we think that they will greatly influence the experience of playing the DLC as well as the base game.

First of these is the global map. This was a contested issue since the alpha versions and is probably the most frequent complaint we get from the people that have a positive view of the game as a whole. Some people may be wondering if the global map was something that was originally planned for the game and, truth to be told, I don't really remember (original plans for the game were laid almost 10 years ago now), but knowing myself I would probably implement one if I had the (time) resources that I have now. Back when I was at it alone I had to cut corners in both content and feature departments, and map is a bit of both really. Later, when the game has grown monstrously in size, even though I then had the time to add new features, a good amount of geographical inconsistencies made sure that there was no quick and easy way to produce a quality map, but instead some major rearragements were going to have to be made.

But anyway, now that we got around to doing this, here's how the map implementation looks like (new players be careful, there are minor spoilers).

We're going to have separate maps for different depths and some maps for the bigger urban areas. We've only gotten around to SGS, Lower Caves and Lower Underrail so far, but here's how the full list will probably look like:

Lower Caves (includes Junkyard and Hathor)

Upper Caves

Lower Underrail (includes Rail Crossing)

Upper Underrail

Black Sea

Foundry

SGS

DC

Core City and Institute will not be included, at least not initially, because reasons. We are, also, not going to be making any maps for "dungeon" areas and such (like GMS) unless they are part of geography of existing maps (such as Depot A being part of Lower Caves by being an extension of Junkyard).

As you can see on the screenshots, maps will (usually, but not always) record and display what useful (or not so useful) creatures and plants you've encountered there as well as other points of interest (merchants, doctors, certain quest objects). These will not be updated after the initial encounter and do not always represent the actual state of the map, but are rather meant to be used as useful auto-notes for harvesting organs and plants and such. They will typically not record robotic and human enemies. You can also add your own notes to the map. A lot of static features of the map will also reveal themselves as you explore the map so that you won't automatically know, for example, if there's a power generator on that map immediately after entering.

The map will be available in the next updated which will be released sometime before the DLC which is going to be released when it's ready. But on a serious note, I do hope to release a new update on the experimental branch at least in the near future so you guys can play with all the new stuff that we've added over the months and we can finally get this huge pile of patch notes off of our shoulders (and replace them with bug reports).

Anyway, let us know what you think about the inclusion of the global map and about this particular implementation. In the next dev log I'll probably be talking about another important, but probably less impressive, change to the base game that we're working on.

Hi guys. I did some changes regarding veteran levels which I originally introduced back in October.

First of all, player will continue to receive the normal amount of skill points when leveling up even on veteran levels now. Also, dervied stats such as health, detection and such will scale normally on veteran levels as well. However, players will also gain a feat every even level instead of every level when leveling on veteran levels. So basically everything is going to work as with normal levels with the exception of the feat pool being expanded with veteran feats once you hit veteran levels.

Allowing of the further skill scaling beyond the 25th level, however, requires us to provide some use for such high skill levels, particularly in crafting. To address this, the end-game areas and stores will have some of its loot/stock scaled up if the Expedition DLC is installed, particularly when it comes to crafting components. In the future, we also intend to address the problem of other non-combat skill scaling (such as social skills and hacking/lockpicking) by adding high level encounters/opportunities, so while currently it might not make sense to max out these skills, in the future it will have benefits.

However, the second, and more important change, is that on veteran levels you'll also get three specialization points.

You use these specialization points to further improve your non-veteran feats, often across specific dimension, as demonstrated in the GIF above. Your investment of points in any given specialization cannot exceed your veteran level (or the maximum allowed points for that specialization).

Just wanted to let you all know that, even though we've been quiet, we're working hard on getting all the content for the expansion done, now that all the new mechanics have been implemented. The good news is that the the bulk of the main quest, including all the heavy scripting, c&c, etc, is complete and functioning (for the most part, it needs further testing, of course).

For those who just can't wait to get to explore the Black Sea themselves, here's a short video from the recent internal testing that we've done (this is NOT a trailer). It does contain some spoilers, though we tried to censor the important stuff, so be warned.

Underrail [official site] is a game that wants to be Fallout. That’s okay! That’s a legendary game for several reasons, and some are even good. There’s definitely room for an RPG to be to Fallout what Xenonauts is to UFO: neither remake nor clone, but a new game that does all the same stuff we’ve missed, only without an interface from the Stupid Age.

Underrail, however, is not that game. It’s a bold attempt, but ultimately one that misses too many marks, and copies too many notes from the Bumper Book Of Frustrating RPG Design We Still Have To Put Up With For Some Reason.

Hi guys. We're all but done with the biggest feature of the expansion and that's the player's ability to ride jet skis.

Since the expansion takes place on Black Sea, naturally you will need a way to travel between all the small islands, bays and between far shores. You will be able to do this on a dozen of different jet skis, ranging from super light racing jet skis to mini-destroyers, which you can further customize under the hood by installing better engines, batteries and suspension systems. The models themselves differ way by the combat cover, durability, stability, speed, damage resistances, as well number of and maximum size of a parts you can install into them; some vehicles can have multiple engines and/or batteries. Also, some jet skis will have special attacks or abilities.

Once you get to the Black Sea it won't take long for you to get a hold of the most basic "junk jet", but to get the quality stuff, both in terms of the jet ski model and the parts, you'll have to spend a fair amount of charons at a specialized shop in Core City. You'll also have to decide what are the most important characteristics of jet ski for you, as no one model will be best at everything.

While riding a jet ski you'll be able to use most of your weapons, abilites and utilities. The most notable exceptions are sledgehammers and sniper rifles, which are not available while driving. Also, short range melee weapons (fist weapons and knives) and unarmed attacks, though still performable, will suffer significant penalties. When an attack is aimed at you, it has a chance of hitting the jet ski instead (or in case of AoE attacks, a percentage of the damage hits the vehicle), depending on the cover it provides, in which case the damage is tested against its resistences and the amount that penetrates those is deducted from the vehicle's durability. If the durability reaches zero, the vehicle is destroyed and you die (you never learned to swim).

That's it for now, guys. Let us know how all this sounds and I hope you're looking forward to some naval battles with pirates and worse things.

Hi guys. In the past few months we've been working (and we're still working) on a couple of major features for the expansion, but we didn't want to show any of them before they were ready. First of these that are now done are the new weapons, so without further ado I give you the three new weapon types - the spear, the machete and the shotgun.

The choice of spear and machete as new weapons was mostly thematic (you will learn why in some later dev log), but these weapons will also have their own place in the melee arsenal. Spears are meant to be versatile offensive and defensive weapons, while machetes are meant to be high risk-high reward weapons that will rely on the user keeping up the offensive. More on the exact mechanics of this will be revealed later when I get to implementing their specific feats. There are two types of machetes that differ slight in critical chance/damage stats.

Now the interesting one of the bunch is the shotgun. I say this because the mechanics of the shotgun are unlike anything else that we had in the game so far when it comes to weapons. When a shotgun is fired it launches a number of pellets that may hit the intended target, some other target in the attack cone or might miss completely. So the chance to hit with the shotgun is not so much indicative of weather or not you'll inflict damage on the enemy, but how much of the damage you launch their way is going to land on the primary target.

I'm going to give you some random shotgun stats below, but keep in mind that this has not be properly balance tested and that before we get a chance to play around with this new weapon a bit it's hard to gauge it's effectiveness and what the numbers should be in order for it to fit into the role intended for it. There is a lot of factors that come into play here depending on the situation and it will take some time to make sure they perform as expected at different ranges (medium, close and point blank) and against different enemies (low armor/high armor). By the way, pay attention to the interaction with the different ammo types when considering the raw damage stat.

I've also implemented the ability for weapons (and gear in general) to grant you special attacks and abilities so expect more of that in the future.

The process of adding these new weapons took a long time because we had to change the way we handled animations of all the different human models and it required a lot of manual labor to get things in order. However, now that we have done this, it will allow us to add more new weapons in the future (not in this DLC, though), to which we are rather looking forward to. I'm not gonna lie, we already know what weapons we want to add in the future, so just keep that in mind when you're posting your wishes.

Hi guys, soon we'll be ready to release a new update for the game. For those who wish to help us test it, we've set up "Experimental" branches on Steam and GOG Galaxy.

To play experimental branch on Steam, you right click the game in your library and go to "Betas" tab. To do so on GOG, you select the game and choose More->Settings. Make sure you don't override all your live version saves just in case something goes horribly wrong.

Here are the patch notes:

Feats

AP reduction from Gunslinger feat will now properly affect only firearms

Added feats: Bowyer (crossbow crafting)

Ripper feat will now properly work with serrated knives

Visuals

Added a new visual model for siphoner, ancient rathound, and super steel armor

Telekinetic proxies and electrokinetic imprints will now be visible behind walls

Interface

Added tooltips for empty gear slots

Forcing the vent with crowbar will now be done through Quick Invoker (once the crowbar is equipped, you'll get the ability there)

Changed the "Focused" tooltip to be gender neutral (tested for all 99 genders)

Mechanics

Cats nerfed

Dreadnoughts buffed

When a character that has nightvision turned on gets flashbanged, they will also be dazed for 5 turns

Some of the merchants now have additional mercantile checks which (if passed) will expand that merchant's store inventory

Items

Borer Gizzard renamed to Metaworm Gizzard and is now also dropped by Latchers

In the expansion, we'll be adding a new psionic school called "Temporal Manipulation", which will primarily feature delayed damage and buffing/debuffing abilities.

This psi discipline will, probably more than any other, will function well as a support skill that can be incorporated into other builds, rather than a primary skill around which a build is made, though I have no doubt that some of you will find a way to prove me wrong.

Here are the abilities:

Temporal Distortion - Places a debuff on the target that lasts 1 turn and deals mechanical and energy damage when it expires. In the case the target is already affected by temporal distortion, its duration will be increased by 1 turn and damage by 25% and the newly applied temporal distortion will have the same duration and damage bonus. Damage dealt by this ability ignores shield and 50% of damage resistance and threshold. This ability cannot critically hit.

Entropic Recurrence - Repeats the percentage of the last unit of damage taken by the target over 3 turns. This damage ignores shields and resistances. In cases when the original damage was very slight, the recurrence may actually empower it.

Temporary Rewind - Reverses the last damage done to the target, up to certain amount depending on the skill level. After two turns this health is lost and this may cause the target to die.

Precognition - While this ability is active, your chance to dodge and evade attacks is increased by certain percentage depending on skill level (additively). Drains 25 psi points every turn.

Stasis - Places the target in stasis for 2 turns, making it immune to all damage and most disabling effects, but also preventing it from acting. While in stasis, the target's status effects will not progress (except the stasis one), but the cooldowns will.

Hey guys, it's time to start revealing some concrete info on the expansion. Some new game mechanics stuff, to be precise.

First, let's talk about leveling. Once your character levels past level 25, they become a "veteran" character. To gain veteran levels, a character will require significantly more experience (both oddity and classical) than for regular levels. Player can gain a maximum of 5 veteran levels, so the new level cap is 30.

Veteran characters no longer receive base ability or skill points during leveling and their derived stats such as health, detection and so on do not scale with levels anymore. However, they do get to pick a feat every level and, in addition to regular feats, they can also pick from the veteran feat pool.

Veteran feats, at least in this expansion, tend to be more general in nature, but they can also give you some important bonuses that you cannot otherwise obtain. Here are some examples (in addition to the one on the screenshot):

Tempered: Acid/Cold/Electricity/Heat - Reduces all X (depending on feat) damage taken by 30%.

Major Supplier - Increases the amount of money the merchants are willing to use when trading with you by 2% per mercantile skill.

Keep in mind that these feats might be altered, pending testing.

The reason I decided to prevent certain aspects of character from scaling beyond level 25 is to avoid having the character outscale the content at his current main storyline progression just by raw character power. Because we'll be expanding the game horizontally in this expansion (and probably in the future) we need to take special care to still provide adequate challenge to the player while also allowing them to improve some aspects of their character.